01/16/2017

War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.

-Carl von Clausewitz, On War

This weekend, I finally watched Eye in the Sky. I was quite impressed with it and so would like to tell the world, that is my humble audience of readers, about it. To provide a sentence-long synopsis for those who know nothing about the movie, Eye in the Sky deals with the questions about rules of engagement posed up by a British drone operation when a high-value civilian becomes possible collateral damage.

All media, whether a textbook or a movie, have two fundamental purposes: To educate and to entertain. Eye in the Sky successfully does both by posing a question about drone-warfare and then exploring how the characters react to that question and to the reactions of other characters. The plot unfolds in the cascade of events that follow and how the characters react to those cascading. There are no stunts, little quipping and very few explosions. Instead, Eye in the Sky’s plot is driven forwards by dialogue and, thanks to a very tight script, conversation is enough to ratchet the tension up scene by scene. The leads, Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman, were both great in their roles, with both actors providing a sympathetic light to a program that many, such as myself, are very willing to condemn as immoral. Aaron Paul is also quite good and he also provides quite a sympathetic look at the role he plays within the drone program.

Then again, I am also intrigued by dialogues that bring dense issues to light. The dense issues that this movie brings to light are those involving rules of engagement. Indeed, Eye in the Sky can be seen more as a dialogue about the rules of engagement in an undeclared war than as a movie about drone-warfare per se. For those who like this kind of movie, I also recommend Conspiracy, a movie about the Wannsee Conference.

This concern brings me to my complaint about the movie: It has surprisingly little to do with the drone-warfare that is going on in the world around us. Perhaps the reason is that the movie is from a British point of view, but at least from an American point of view, many of the questions brought up in the movie have been become daily occurrences. One needn’t go farther than Jeremy Scahill’s Assassination Complex to know that American drone-warfare tactics have gone far beyond the questions about the rules of engagement Eye in the Sky inquires into.

Moreover, the movie does not deal with one of the most salient aspects of drone-warfare: That drones are used to prosecute undeclared wars. They can strike anywhere without warning, and therein lie their novelty to the rules of engagement. That novelty certainly offers advantages to the nations who use drones, but the ability to readily attain violent ends without having to go through proper diplomatic protocol is a powerful drug that can, and has, become addictive to those who use it.

There is a reason that just-war theory insists on a declaration of war. Even when that declaration is merely ceremonial, it still provides civilians with the knowledge that war is upon them. Even when they cannot vacate the place of hostilities, that declaration still allows them to inform their decisions with the knowledge that they can be killed straying into dangerous areas. Sometimes mere rituals can serve a valuable role in communicating intentions across society. This aspect of war is central to Eye in the Sky and yet never it is addressed.

Despite those qualms, I do hope that everyone decides to watch Eye in the Sky, even if it provides too romantic a view of drone-warfare, because it still brings up one of the most salient issues that governments must cope with, and one does hope resolve to constrain. Because it is undeclared and because it produces very few casualties for the nation using the drones, the costs of this secretive warfare can easily be buried in the headlines. Last October, an American destroyer launched a missile that killed over a hundred people—and yet all people could talk about that week was whether Donald Trump grabbed a secretary’s genitals. With the war distant and out of voters’ minds, the American military wields an uncomfortably vast amount of power in that region. It can kill both innocent civilians and American citizens alike without having to ever be accountable for those decisions.

It has been said that the first casualty in war is the truth. Certainly the second must be due process.

10/20/2012

From William Ewart Gladstone's speech
at West Cader on November 7th 1879 as part of his
Midlothian Campaign against Prime Minister Disraeli's government:

And that sixth
(principle of foreign policy) is, that in my opinion foreign policy,
subject to all the limitations that I have described, the foreign
policy of England should always be inspired by the love of freedom.
There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope,
founded not upon visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of
many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in
freedom you lay the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order;
the firmest foundations for the development of individual character,
and the best provision for the happiness of the nation at large.

It
is tempting to think merely in terms of national interests when it
comes to foreign policy. After all, each nation has a scarce amount
of resources at its disposal and ought not its principle guiding
force be to advance the interests of its citizens? However, once we
go down the rabbit-hole of national-interest politics then where do
we end? At what point must national interests be sacrificed in order
not to violate the moral prescriptions of virtue and propriety? The
cold truth, though, is that whenever we speak in terms of national
interests, we have put moral concerns aside and have come to foreign
affairs as merely a technical problem, with the end (i.e. the
national interests) given with the question now being what means must
be employed to achieve those ends most efficiently.

A
moral foreign policy cannot be one dictated by mere national
interests. They are certainly important, but no nation is well served
by officials willing to sacrifice foreigners at the parochial altar
of national interests because there is then the threat that those
officials will then be willing to act similarly against their own
citizens. Plus, in the uncertain world of foreign affairs, it is
often unclear how to advance national interests: the lines between
friend a foe blur, the data of each situation are unknown, and even
the mission itself is not entirely known. What can be in the national
interest a year ago may have turned out to be conditioned on a
mistaken appraisals of intelligence. We must have recourse to general
rules then and the only general rules that action should be informed
by in government are the rules dictated by justice.

Along
with those rules comes a deep devotion to human liberty. Sadly
American foreign policy motivated by the very same love of freedom
that Gladstone speaks about has lead to unnecessary interventions,
entangling alliances and the squandering of resources. Whether it be
in Afghanistan, Iraq, or
Libya, the honest love of freedom, among other things, has too often
lead the United States into no-win situations it is too proud to
simply leave.

However,
it need not be that way and to understand why it need not be that
way, we must understand that freedom is not just an abstract state
of affairs, but rather a fruit of a society of law. Too often those
who advocate freedom, whether in Gladstone's era or our own, advocate
it as if it is a idea removed from the institutional specifics of
society, as if it is something that simply has to be accepted rather
than cultivated by law. However, if we take the writings of men from
Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hayek to heart, what we must accept is that
freedom is something that must emerge in each society by the proper
functioning of laws. It is simply not something people can be
liberated into for freedom without the rule of law will never sustain
itself, but will collapse into chaos and faction.

A
foreign policy of freedom, even though it is far more the claim of
modern Libertarians than modern Conservatives, must still be a
conservative foreign policy. The reason is that a free society does
not simply come into being by the fiat of its rulers or by the fiat
of foreign invaders, but by stable domestic institutions and by the
rule of law. A tragic consideration that we must accept is that not
all societies are ready to reap the fruits of liberty, whether this
be for reason for a lack of the rule of law or maybe due to unstable
institutions; liberty is as much a historical accident as conscious
creation of the human mind. Any foreign policy that proclaims to be
for freedom while at the same time destroying the institutions and
rule of law that are its preconditions in foreign countries is no
foreign policy of freedom, it is a foreign policy of tyranny which is
bound to result from the conditions it causes in other countries.

A
foreign policy of freedom must then be a policy of example and
sympathy. It must be a policy of setting a virtuous and just example
to other nations by showing how the conditions of freedom are a boon
for the prosperity of the nation. It must be a policy of sympathy
because no advocate for freedom within our modern and inter-connected
world can stay silent as liberty in quashed in foreign parts of the
world, but must be an active advocate willing to extend its sympathy
across the world. However, prolonged engagements and entangling
alliances do nothing to make possible the conditions of liberty in
other countries, and as such they must be rejected.